


The Winter That Never Ended

by PseudoFox



Series: Muckin' in the Marshlands [5]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Anthropomorphic, Awkwardness, Battle, Drama, F/M, Family Drama, Fear, Finland (Country), Friendship, Major Original Character(s), Minor Original Character(s), Original Character(s), Phobias, Snark, Winter War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14874995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoFox/pseuds/PseudoFox
Summary: Bloody conflict stretches across the continent and forces different species to band together or else, fighting to save their shared homelands. They all understand that merely surviving for another day takes a toll on them. One particular gopher's story shows exactly how the long shadow of history— with all of the fears and phobias it creates— endures for generations.





	The Winter That Never Ended

**Once upon a time in a place quite far in both distance and time from Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde's Zootopia,**

The slow but steady fall of thick snow battered down upon plank after plank of the aged wooden hut. The typical winter weather only made the aura of the early morning even stronger. Natural instincts screamed at all manner of creatures to forget anything constructive and just sleep. Even the tiny branches blown about by the wind seemed the same— they preferred to bump up against the various little farm buildings dotting the landscape and come to a stop.

Nonetheless, the five mammals inside the hut felt nothing but the emotional grip that the few, close moments before a firefight took upon their senses. They clutched their well-worn rifles against their thick jackets as their thoughts and feelings went through a routine— one that every partisan knew quite well. A mixture of stinging depression and that roiling inner flame of hopeful camaraderie flowed through their flesh. Every one of them simply had to look at the other four's stone-like expressions to know that they had little choice.

They had to be there. They had to keep fighting. They had to keep the campaign going— little groups of partisans attacking before quickly fleeing. They had to survive.

"At least," Matti Holkeri whispered to himself, "we didn't get assigned to my cousin's town... shoved up so close to the arctic that a January night never ends."

The gopher's lanky figure of slim muscles beneath striped waves of grey fur had lasted only a few weeks up at the northern tip of the country. The experience had scarred him. Waking up to utter darkness before going about his day— moving from eating a breakfast of fried fish and potatoes to chopping wood logs to knitting fresh sweaters and more— only to find the blackness still clutching the entire landscape in its tight grip when bedtime came around... it felt like an unending nightmare.

The life that the 'New Soviet Mammal' promised him and his countrymammals seemed exactly the same. The mere word 'metaphor' didn't cut it. The monstrous entity in charge of the Soviet war machine aimed to spread a curtain of pure darkness across the entire continent, legions of soldiers exterminating everything that didn't fit the goal of absolute loyalty to him and him alone. Matti knew that. His four companions in the wooden hut knew that as well.

The gopher looked up at the three Mosin–Nagants held in the air right across from his head. The predators that had delicately cleaned and otherwise maintained those deadly rifles had also put things perfectly in their remarks to the other squads. The words stuck with Matti.

"This operation by the invaders from the East aims to slice our entire nation in two," they had remarked, "and we shall shove them back down so mercilessly that they wind up skewering themselves."

Matti and his fellow partisans had all grown up in the little fishing villages dotting the numerous lakes and twisting rivers of the constantly frozen countryside. They knew the little gullies surrounded by vast swaths of thick trees more than they could ever say. Each mammal had spent morning after morning playing in the marshy lands alongside the jagged, rarely paved roads. Three of the five had even pretended to be kings exploring their royal dominions, with all manner of fishes and insects alike getting ordered about by those greyish-colored kits. They'd aged into determined foxes.

Standing across from those three huddled predators, the massive hare Johan Hjalmar had allowed his eyes to close halfway. His ears drooped slightly as well— they wound up resting against a loose batch of poorly hammered nails on the wooden planks above his head. He'd entered his own bizarre sort of partly concentrating and partly resting mental zone that mostly served him well.

It, at least, kept him from needing that much actual sleep when the infamous Finnish nights began. He could spend more time reading and then planning. On the other paw, though, trying too much mental activity while in that peculiar mental zone had caused what his companions deemed 'the incident'. The hare lit the wrong end of a cigarette and nearly set his entire outfit of warm, tight-fitting clothes ablaze.

The nickname of 'Liekki'— meaning simply 'Flame'— had stuck even after months of fighting together. The hare no longer minded. He had little chance in persuading the close-knit foxes otherwise.

The smallest of the five partisans thought that he had the most to fight for. He had to concede, though, that he had the most to lose as well. It wasn't simply that his family owned the most land nearby. It wasn't either that his happily patriotic and devoutly religious family hated the idea of forcibly renouncing either tradition, especially to an outside occupier. Even the compelling news that he'd recently learned didn't hit him the most.

Matti actually stood a good several inches taller than the average gopher. Of course, that didn't change how both predators and other prey mammals alike constantly dwarfed him. Beyond that, they constantly treated him as a just part of the scenery, viewing him as a mere prop in the stage dramas that were their own life stories. Before the invasion began, Matti spent day after day getting literally shoved aside and stepped on. Yet he'd prefer that far more than those that pet his little ears and condescendingly found him adorable for trying to participate in the nation's life 'like the rest of us'— those mammals turned his insides into mush.

Unfortunately, life in Matti's little unit of anti-Soviet partisans proved only somewhat different. He could use his miniaturized pistol and his likewise modified rifle well-enough. That fact, however, only salved a small part of the ever-gaping wound that was his feelings of inadequacy. The hare sped across distances as if his mother had been a motorcycle, and his kick had a force like falling down a flight of stairs. The foxes, for their part, had the ability to spring into ravenous biting attacks when the moment called for it— they showed a fury that still made the gopher a bit scared, being on the same side notwithstanding. Matti had his tiny weapons and something back in his hometown village to look forward to. That, he thought, seemed about it.

"Matti," the littlest of the foxes suddenly called out.

"Yes, Michel?" the gopher asked back. He brushed his soft furred neck against the thin scope of his rifle.

"When will you find out if it's a boy or a girl?" The question came with the hint of a smile, quite an oddity for the usually solemn predators.

"I know already," the gopher replied. He shut his eyes for a moment, taking in a little breath.

"Oh?" the largest of the foxes chimed in.

"The letter last night, actually," Matti went on, opening his eyes, "made things clear. It's a girl."

"Congratulations," the three said in their varying voices, the middle-sized fox oddly featuring the most gruff, guttural sounding voice. Things went beyond hints to outright grins.

"It's really," Matti remarked, reflexively patting his right coat pocket and the letter tucked deep inside, "quite a—"

A deafening explosion rocked the wooden hut, the force nearly blowing it right over. None of the mammals inside needed to think. They barely even breathed. All five of them shot out of the back entrance and into the mounds of snow.

The explosives that an earlier squad of partisans had placed wound up working. The final squad— their squad— simply needed to finish the job. Naturally enough given the ways of the war, Matti and his companions knew from intercepted communications that they'd get outnumbered by a margin of two to one if not three to one. They had to move fast and make every shot count. Across a wide yet short expanse of marshland, the mammals' eyes focused on the gravel-covered road besot with various ponds.

A gigantic truck lay in ruins. Its entire front side had gotten transformed into smoldering hunk of misshapen metal— it looked akin to a mound of mashed carrots after Liekki had shoved his fork in. Smoke surged out in multiple directions. Various clumps of brown fur covered by thin yet easily-seen jackets and tangled pants— the misapplied outfits being a gift of the inspid Soviet army bureaucracy to their enemies' war effort— stuck out from the many patches of snow. As they'd done several times before, the five mammals of the resistance slowly split up, walking into a circle at the edge of the battle scene.

"At least two," Matti murmured to himself, using the mantra that'd served him in fight after fight before, "got to get at least two myself. At least two myself— kill them."

The furry clumps wiggled about. Limbs thrust into the air. Untranslatable screams of raw emotion boomed across the winter air. It only took a matter of seconds for the gopher to see three different bears picking themselves up on his side of the damaged truck, with the predators' limbs clutching their pockets.

Matti hoisted his rifle up and fired. A splash of bright crimson rippled across the first of the bears' necks. The big predator let out that low groan of death that Matti had heard many times. A pair of shots from the other side of the battle rang out as well. The gopher didn't let that distract him. He watched as the corpse slumped up against the staggering bear beside it.

All that noise, though, caused the last of the three bears to trip on the icy gravel underneath him— the huge mammal, still looking dazed, flopped flat on his back yet again. The middle bear fumbled about with limbs shoved into the air. Matti prepared to fire once again. He spotted the middle bear trying to hold up a thin yet still deadly pistol. The potential shooter's face twisted from simple confusion to a glare of brutal realization— the bear's featured filled with sheer rage.

The gopher shifted his body weight and fired again. The pistol flopped right out of the bear's paw. The huge predator's arm snapped like a jackknife. Redness gushed out all around his elbow. Yet he let out a loud roar— showing that he had plenty of life left— before bracing himself to run right where the gopher stood.

Matti's eyes grew eyes grew wide as his town's old waterwheel. He had only split-seconds to react. He held his rifle even closer to his chest and fired a third time.

The bullet just missed the bear's shoulder and ricocheted against the jagged side of the truck's torn windshield— it likely wound up in one of the snowbanks right nearby. Blood still poured from the bear's wound. Yet he charged for the gopher all the same. Both arms featured the sharpest claws poised against the frozen air that Matti had ever seen. To make matters even worse, some other bear behind the attacking predator— possibly the shocked predator still lying flat on his back— blasted off two pistol shots.

They both haphazardly whizzed far above the gopher's head. Matti pulled his own rifle's trigger. He heard nothing but the soul-crushing noise of a jam.

Matti found himself one quick moment from the bear's claws ripping off entire face. The gopher's teeth stuck out as he sucked in a deep breath. He swung his rifle out like a club. He heard even more shots going off, sounding like they'd gotten fired off over in the other side of the battle. Feeling completely on his own, the gopher bravely kept swinging.

"Bastards!" Matti screamed out. He managed to chuck his rifle upwards and shove it against the bear's mauling arm. The tiny burst of force had just enough strength to slide the bear's slashing motion off of the gopher's face and into the nearby snow. "You'll never get Suomussalmi!" The bear still hurled his entire body upon the little prey mammal. "Burn in hell!"

The bear suddenly stopped slashing. His giantic arms— one still gushing out blood from the gopher's lucky shot a moment before— clutched Matti's sides. The big predator opened up his mouth wide. A disgusting breath filled with raw hate covered the gopher's face. Movingly quickly, Matti managed to shove his rifle over his face and prop it against the bear's shoulder, but the wood immediately cracked as the bear's teeth descended. He was about to be literally eaten alive.

Matti's right paw had a split-second left to thrust down to a side pocket, the little mammal going for a 'hail Mary' move. He expected to find a Browning Hi-Power there. He felt nothing. The gopher's soul seemed to shrink as the last bit of hope inside of him faded. It took another split-second before the bear's jagged teeth began to dig into the gopher's cheeks.

Yet an immense blur of solid redness burst across Matti's entire body. He rapidly blinked as he made a torrent of weak, squeak-like noises of desperation. The bear pulled himself off of the gopher, crying out noises of agonizing pain. As soon as he could manage to keep his eyes open, Matti witnessed a horrific sight. A shot coming from far behind both of them had sliced through the front of the bear's forehead. Flaps of mutilated flesh curled down the big mammal's cheek while blood poured out from the spot that had been an eye.

Matti barely had time to react. He belted out his own, weak imitation of a big mammal's desperate growl. He punched and kicked straight ahead at full force. That somehow managed to make the blood-soaked bear slump a little bit to the side.

"God!" Matti yelled out, seeing almost every inch of him coated in blood. He tried to stand up straight upon the thick snow, but none of his limbs obeyed, the gopher's weak body remaining curled up against a patch of sleet and frosty branches. "Please!"

The sight before him somehow grew far worse. The gopher witnessed the bear twisting around. The blinded predator slashed his claws straight downward, tearing first into the empty air. The lack of direction didn't change the bear's deadly power one bit. The claws finally came down upon th gopher's helpless body. Clumps of thick fabric shot out all over the place. Adrenaline surging all through his senses, the gopher felt ripping and tearing below his neck without the slightest clue if he'd have a body left when the bear finished. He struggled mightily to move but fell into a deep shock.

One last round of gunfire sounded off. The bear's flailing finally stopped. Some last spark deep inside of him gave the gopher a burst of energy. Matti hurled his rifle upward and worked to shove the big mammal off of him. Blood gushed everywhere, redness covering every part of Matti's body that he could see. All kinds of swirling sensations filled the gopher's mind as he got free one limb at a time from underneath the dying predator. It felt impossible to even breathe.

Though still letting out noises of total hate, the bear was finished. One of his claw-covered limbs had stuck itself into gopher's jacket. Matti wiggled every last bit of himself that he could still feel and got totally free, the gopher finally tumbling out onto the bare snowbank beside him. He scampered several inches forward, sucked in a deep breath, and looked straight up.

Michel stood triumphant as a posing statue before the gopher. The fox's devious-looking grin covered every spare spot of his large face. He rubbed a paw against his trusty rifle.

Matti silently panted. He watched as the fox curled out his paw and pointed. Matti cocked his head to the side. He stared as the wounded bear took in one last breath. Fleshy bits oozing down what used to be the bear's face, the huge mammal made a last, instinctual move by waving a beaten-up claw straight upwards into the air. That lasted for three solid seconds before he simply collapsed. So much blood had poured out during the entire scene that it looked to Matti as if a lake had begun to form.

"What... kept you?" Matti murmured, staggering himself upward.

He heard Michel let out a deep laugh. The gopher rapidly blinked, trying to use the snow by his legs to brush the excessive blood from his arms and face. The pieces of foreign flesh dotting his own fur nauseated the gopher more than he could ever describe.

Matti saw the other two foxes appear beside their companion. They chuckled as well. The gopher stared out blankly, still trying to clean off his face.

"You're welcome," Michel remarked. He pulled his rifle down and coated its edge with freshly fallen snow. The fox then decliately brushed it across the gopher's back and along his neck. Matti remained silent for another moment, his pained expression still betraying his mixed emotions.

"Well, Matti, today has meant at least one thing," began the gruff-voiced fox from the back, "when your daughter is growing up, you can tell her this: you stopped a rampaging bear— a full officer protecting a truck full of supplies no less— using nothing but a jammed gun and your own father's winter coat."

"It's... it's ruined, isn't it?" Matti finally reached across his chest and belly. He felt a huge array of claw marks on his thick jacket, blood still sickeningly dripping down. By some miracle, nonetheless, none of it appeared to be his. The bear's crazed slashes hadn't penetrated deep enough— not getting past the final plain t-shirt Matti had worn underneath everything else. "But... well..."

"Come on," Liekki said, popping seemingly out of nowhere to pull the gopher forward. He did a quick spin that let the gopher see that the hare had already snatched up the misplaced Browning. "We've got plenty to do."

The hare hopped right away. The foxes took a little more time gathering themselves. The gopher followed his four companions back to the wooden hut where they'd started. They all grabbed their special pairs of skis and got ready for a bit of a journey on them— Liekki took a moment to hunt for the bag with all of their goggles in it.

All of the mammals except for Matti grabbed clumps of fresh ammunition. The gopher felt his pistol slipped back into place in his pocket. He stepped to the corner of the hut but quickly froze. His mind constantly flashed back to the past several minutes of action, the sound of his rifle's jamming replaying over and over again.

"Ah, that so-called 'miniaturized' hunk of shit!" Liekki remarked. He seized the gopher's special rifle and eyed it from inch to offending inch. "The foxes and I, with our Mosin–Nagants? They're things of beauty." The hare held out a paw and stroked along the butt of his own weapon, resting against the wooden hut's walls for a moment. "Such a contrast to your monstrosity!"

"Yeah," Matti muttered, "I'd rather just stick to my Browning, honestly." He gestured at the slick black metal edge sticking out of his jacket's pocket. Yet he lowered his voice a bit. "Assuming I even have time to draw it when the moment comes, which I didn't. Or that it stops falling out of this damned coat."

"I'll bet it's simply impossible to clean one of these Mouser rifles properly," the hare went on. He clutched the gopher's weapon and hoisted it far over both their heads. "See, you can't brush those little nooks that you just have to brush, and there's... yeah." Liekki stopped, sparing the gopher a rant about the state of the arms industry coming into the 1940s.

"Here," said a sudden voice. Although looking off in the opposite direction, gopher felt something plopped into his open arms. "We might as well keep it for ourselves. The officer's sure not going to need it where he is right now."

"Right," the gopher flatly responded. He gave the weapon a good, long look.

Matti hadn't recognized the bear's unusual pistol before, and upon closer inspection he could see exactly why. Almost everything past the safety catch appeared far smaller than usual. It made no sense for a larger mammal. However, the trigger itself coupled with the whole area around its loaded magazine had a sort of compromise size not that different from Matti's Browning. Intriguingly, the metal featured a variety of symbols carved upon them with little Russian letters beside them. All and all, the pistol appeared tailor-made by an expert using a mishmash of parts, possibly aimed for use by a clique of different species.

"It's a Tula-Tokarev," Matti declared, letting himself smile for the first time in a while, "one of those special guns given to the so-called 'political officers' even the Soviet's own mammals hate." He shoved it into a seam created by the attacking bear's clawing upon his belly. "And with my little tailoring, done by its former owner, it seems like something I could even carry."

Matti glanced upwards and saw that the other mammals had already began to ski back out to the battle site. He felt flashes of slight but growing pain that would cause his wife to demand he lie down for a fifteen minute rest were she there. She wasn't, and Matti duly followed his fellow partisans.

They didn't have long to gather the captured supplies. A nearby village needed help with its own defense about as soon as they could manage that next trip. Still, the hare decided to take a quick yet detailed study of the blown-up truck. He let out a happy noise and jumped around a bit when he realized that they'd captured the best prize of all: the truck had carried stocks and stocks of cooking materials, with even a bunch of tightly-packaged dried foods included. The number of items that hadn't gotten blown up fit well into the five fighters' backpacks.

Taking out Soviet field kitchens had done far more to cripple the invaders than even the resistance's senior staff had thought. If the bears couldn't get a reliable meal, then their morale didn't just crater. They got forced to rely more and more on the foreign landscape to get what they could eat, making them even easier pickings for the quickly-moving partisans.

"God, I'll bet the markings mean the officer had some kind of heirloom by a communist special group," the gopher remarked, following right beside his compatriots in their breezy skiing, "and we might even be able to tell."

He exchanged nods with the hare, both of them twisting about to avoid a suddenly appearing batch of trees. A branch knocked against the gopher's side. He spat out a chunk of snow that had gotten whacked up into his mouth.

"Just grab the Russian-speaking wolf, yeah," Matti went on, "who lives up in—"

A sudden pain shot through the gopher's midriff. He felt his whole body convulse. That couldn't have come at a worse moment. Matti skied straight into a clump of tall rocks.

The other mammals immediately stopped and came to the gopher's aid. Matti had fallen into half-consciousness, the gopher's lips quivering as saliva dripped out of his open mouth. The hare let out a torrent of swear words as he delicately cradled his fellow partisan in his arms. Michel immediately clutched a canister of spring water and brought it to Matti's face.

It took half a minute of frenetic movement before the other mammals finally located what caused the gopher's still mounting pain. Michel shot out both paws and ripped off nearly all Matti's clothes, leaving the gopher in only his underwear. The fox cried out a genuine prayer when he realized what exactly had happened.

The third and final shot upon the still-attacking Soviet officer had somehow knocked a severed piece of his claw— complete with a little nub of flesh, no less— into the corner of the gopher's thick jacket. With all of the slash marks, blood stains, and constant clumping of the snow, the half-buried claw had been impossible to see earlier. The gopher's adrenaline rush coupled with the particularly kinked way in which the claw had stuck into his chest meant that it only partially hurt either.

Yet a mindless swat by an offending branch while skiing had abruptly dug the claw in, blood oozing right beneath the gopher's fur. The bear's horrible sharpness meant that it had the ability to get in deep, causing intense pain. The gopher still seemed barely there when Michel delicately slid the claw right out. Disinfectant and bandages quickly followed, the hare being aptly prepared. Still, the gopher's four companions felt overcome.

"The bastard's last revenge!" Michel declared. Shivering in barely repressed rage, he finally stamped his paws against the snow beneath him and let out a long, deep growl. "The damned 'political officers'! Those pieces of shit had... had... they'd better be burning in hell right now!"

"And to think," Liekki remarked, sighing loudly, "one inch downward and a bit of stupid skiing would've knocked it right off of him altogether! Be just as good as if he was never hit!"

"One inch upward, instead," Michel continued, putting a paw on the hare's shoulder, "and it might've gotten knocked in entirely. He'd be in a wheelchair in a hospital for the rest of his life." The fox shut his eyes. "Or worse."

"True," Liekki murmured, feeling taken aback. Their small group had never had to bury one of their own before. They all hoped against hope that the invasion would end before the sad time would have to come.

"Guys, the hell has happened," Matti moaned, the gopher finally coming to. He shivered. He looked out at the other three mammals with quivering eyes and wandering paws. "Oh, why does it hurt right... like... and we were..."

"The officer that tried to maul you," Michel began, "he—"

"The bear," Liekki interjected, "he left another-"

"Bear, you mean the one that I," Matti started to say. Without even thinking, he shut his eyes tightly. He relieved the entire scene just about twenty minutes earlier. "I... and... we..."

"Matti?" asked the two other foxes. The previously silent mammals stepped up beside their companions. They looked ready to cradle the gopher between them, all of the paws clutching Matti's shoulders as tightly as they could manage. "Will you be okay?"

The gopher let out a piercing scream, the loudest that any of the other mammals had ever heard.

**Nineteen years later off in another corner of Scandinavia,**

"Taatto, I'm begging you," the teenage gopher pleaded, brushing her arms against her smart-looking black miniskirt, "I'm... do you want me to get on my paws and knees? Because I will."

"Li Andersson Holkeri, no," declared Matti, thrusting his arms out of his clunky black overcoat. The playing of the full name card showed his seriousness. "No begging like that! Not in public!"

Li kept her pouting expression on as she stepped away from her father, the older gopher's arms still dangling in the air. Glamorous posters of international movie icons stretched across the red brick wall beside her. She stopped at a set of delicately clean double-doors, the glass glistening in the setting sun's light.

Li pointed back at her father. Inside the cinema, both gophers could see a group of calm, collected prey families awaiting their drinks and popcorn. None of the mammals were of a species Matti had either fought alongside or come up against. Their broad smiles appeared infectious as well.

"Taatto, do you want to be the last mammal in the whole Western World to see 'Savage Seas', really?" Li asked. She hiked up one of her bushy eyebrows, a trait she'd inherited directly from her mother. "It's a global phenomenon."

"I know, my darling." Matti rubbed his paws together— trying to keep his breathing down— as he came to his daughter's side.

"You love those Jack Savage novels. You've devoured them, taatto." She shoved one of the doors halfway open. "And you know how much my big brother has praised the movie."

"I know." Yet he clung to the same chill spot, the autumn wind blowing little brown leaves through his legs.

"And he's stated that— set as it is a whole continent away from here— there's none of a certain species shown within the whole of the movie." Li locked eyes with the older gopher.

"I... yes, my darling," Matti remarked. He felt his daughter clutching of his paws in one of her own. He forced a thin smile. "Yes, it's been quite too long before I've set foot in this kind of a place. The immense train stations, the glamorous movie theaters, the grand Christian churches, and everything else..."

"They await you, taatto," Li declared. She shoved open both doors before letting out a happy sigh. "Come. Like I said before, I already picked up our two tickets when I was on the way to the library, hours and hours ago."

Li left unspoken the fact that both new medication— strange yellow pills associated with blood flow that she didn't understand at all— coupled with a burst talking therapy had made Matti ready to rise above a half-recluse's life. She didn't refer to the stop-then-start-then-stop-again cycle of social connection that her father had struggled with for years after the war. Li felt convinced that she'd won Matti over the past several weeks.

For mammals of her father's generation, seeking any kind of assistance to even the most dire personal problems remained quite taboo. That shade of sickening social traditionalism irritated the thoroughly modern Li as much as the wartime mammals' silly taste in music and even worse taste in fashion. She'd literally drag those that'd listen her into the future if he had to.

"I'm not much for popcorn, I'm afraid," Matti commented, "but I'll more than willing to have one of those sweet iced teas."

The older gopher's nervous eyes glanced out in all directions. The ornate red walls with smooth tile floors and bright yellow lights appeared welcoming enough. He spotted bison, deer, rabbits, and even the occasional lone hyena, the predators outnumbered by the prey at a margin of over ten to one. Everything seemed fine.

"Don't forget," Li remarked. Still engrossed in paying for their refreshments, Matti felt a small slip of paper thrust onto his neck. "You'll need this. Seat H10... it's almost like in middle school how you get assigned to your places in this particular cinema, isn't it?"

"Yes, indeed," Matti muttered. He had a bit of trouble counting out his change. The prices at the cinema— like everywhere else in post-war Sweden every time he visited— seemed to hike up at whatever chance the merchants could grasp. "And, good, here we are."

Time went into a blur as he carried his daughter's huge container of popcorn along a skinny corridor. They stepped into a small set of doors and came upon a huge screen just finishing up with some kind of an advertisement. Matti felt himself truly zone out and relax in public for the longest time. The film hadn't even begun yet. Truly, he thought, he needed to listen to his daughter more often.

Twenty minutes of the movie went by like a shot. Matti found irresistible the charismatic rabbit with his combination of handsome black stripes and hidden physical strength beneath his tuxedo. Jack Savage reminded him immediately of the best of the best that the anti-Soviet agents that various nations had set forth, and somehow that fact only triggered good memories. After rapidly kicking his way through a group of wolves out of a capsizing boat, however, Savage's adventures suddenly lost Matti's attention.

"My apologies, my darling," Matti murmured, sliding himself out of his seat, "but I made a grave mistake getting that tremendous size of an iced tea." He didn't add the gigantic casserole that he'd eaten only a few hours before, which churned his insides more than he had anticipated.

Li let out a short, simple laugh. Matti smiled. He wished he could take all sorts of things that came up in life with her beautiful sense of humor and proportion.

After stepping out of the particular area screening 'Savage Seas', Matti sucked in a deep breath. He couldn't see the restrooms anywhere. Ambling about the corridor for a moment, however, he spotted a sign off in the distance that appeared promising. He made his way over and popped through the doors. Blissfully bereft of other mammals, the clean space appeared like something out of a kitchen catalog for a department store.

"Ah, thank goodness," Matti remarked. It only took him a matter of seconds to pop into a stall. "If only every business could look this nice— God bless us!" He'd managed to sit alongside hares looking exactly like Liekki in his row as well. Truly, he thought, he'd turned a corner.

The sounds of ambling and rustling— somebody else of great size entering the restrooms— didn't come to the gopher's attention one bit. Matti stepped out of the stall and carefully began washing his paws. The gopher pressed his lips together and began whistling a simple tune.

The long, dramatic creak open of another stall's doors stopped Matti's mental concert in its tracks. The gopher's eyes opened as wide as dinner plates. A massive clump of brown fur above bulging muscles— complete with tight-fitting black jacket and thick black boots, no less— stepped over to the gopher's side. Matti's eyes locked on the immensely sharp white claws .

The gopher couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't even think.

Matti's chest area began crying out in a dull but growing pain. He felt some control over his limbs again, tingling sensations shooting out from the bottom of his legs. He had the urge to simply jump back into his former stall. Yet most of him couldn't budge.

The sensations of blood splashed all across his face battered him, causing his eyes to twitch. That counted as, at least, some kind of a movement. Otherwise, his limbs refused even the slightest command.

"What's the problem?" the bear groaned out in a gruff, dark-sounding voice.

"I... I... I..." Matti stammered, his mouth starting to drool from the slight opening to speak.

The bear's voice appeared to rise from the center of the earth. "What, little one?"

Matti simply blinked rapidly. The bear's raised arm went for a container of soap beside the gopher's position. At the same time, though, Matti wasn't anywhere near able to think of things rationally like that. All he saw was the immense creature lifting up its arm and pointing its claw-covered paws directly at his head.

"God!" Matti screamed out, all of the color draining from his face.

The bear, feeling a burst of confusion, froze himself. That gave the gopher the ability to twist his body over and thrust his legs against the floor. Gathering a bit of speed, he burst out of the bathrooms and into the nearby corridor. Turning himself, though, presented a challenge that his flesh didn't meet.

The gopher launched himself, to his horror, directly upon the huge trash can beside the restrooms' door. He shut his eyes tightly. Empty cups of soda, soiled napkins, half-eaten clumps of candy, and more rained down upon him and stuck tightly to his fur. His legs wiggled about upon the wall as the edge of the trash can pinned down one of his arms.

After a few seconds of merely lying in place, his brain feeling wiped of rational thought, Matti cried out with a set of embarrassing squeaks. Eyes opening back up, he spied a fat deer from the far edge of the corridor running over. He opened his mouth a bit only for a crumbled paper bag to fall into it. The gopher wished that he could've been anywhere else than right there at that exact moment. One fact, though, seemed the worst out of everything else.

That horrid sensation in the middle of his chest... it still hurt.

**Over five decades later, in a Zootopia changed forever by the actions of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde,**

"My great-grandfather made it a life's cause to never see another bear after the Winter War," Gail Kalevi-Holkeri Bailey declared. The emotional-looking gopher sat down upon the table and leaned forward, putting his paws into his lap. "Yes, he fought even more Soviets following the incident that nearly crippled him. Of course, he did. He had to. His sort of hit-and-run tactics proved decisive and ultimately the invading powers gave up in their efforts to take over the country."

"And they did win, by a huge margin," chimed in Gail's fox friend, sitting on a concrete block behind the gopher.

"They called him the 'Goodbye Gopher'," Gail continued, cocking his head to the side as he kept reading from his little green notebook, "because of how he got himself into tight spaces and then fired from his captured Soviet pistol. He took out a large number of bears before the war ended, acting like a sniper without a sniper's rifle."

"The war ended, but it kind of didn't end at the same time," the fox added.

"Matti's January 1940 seemed to last his whole life," Gail concluded. He awkwardly coughed, finding himself confused by his own notes. "What I'm trying to say with the 'Jack Savage' story is... well... his fears and phobias changed. For the rest of his life, all throughout peacetime until his death of brain cancer in the late 1970s... like..." Gail trailed off. He finally realized that he had no idea how to properly end his story, and he'd already worked himself up so that his insides felt filled with this fizzy emotional froth.

The Zootopian Genealogy Society featured a wide range of mammals varying in age range, political belief, specific species, social class, and more. They welcomed all manner of stories and enthusiastically greeted prospective members, holding a large number of public meetings. At the same time, though, discussing what one had learned after a bit of research often proved uncomfortable to listeners and speakers alike.

Gail mentally kicked himself for not realizing that the group's meeting at that particular public library had about a fifth of the crowd made up of bears. It hadn't even occurred to him to consider the fact. He'd simply stood up and started talking when he got called on.

"Oh, so like," a teenage wolf with a name-tag that Gail couldn't read began, the predator idly wiggling his paws against his plain white deck chair, "it's a phobia? That kind of makes sense. It's like those mammals who're super scared of spiders. My little sister is so totally like that, my God."

"I mean," Gail interjected, but he didn't feel sure at all what to say, "it got even more serious than that."

"My sister won't even go to WoolMart's, you know? The big ones," the teenager continued, getting more animated, "have those 'pet sections', right? She totally hates the idea of even being close to where spiders are held, off in their little crate-like things! She sees even a CD cover, a magazine, a newspaper, or whatever the hell else with a picture of a spider on it? She flips! She's so afraid!"

"With my great-grandfather," the gopher finally said, figuring out a delicate way to put things, "he decided to turn things into this really basic prejudice. It went beyond something like never seeing a play with bears in it, even as 'the bad guys'. He wouldn't go to any public space where it appeared likely a bear would come in. Even riding in a private car on a highway seemed tough, with spying somebody off in another lane triggering another reaction."

"Reaction?" asked an gentle-looking elderly hare sitting off to Gail's side. He couldn't make out her name-tag either. "Oh, that PTSD, it's so serious. God bless anyone who's suffered from it."

"Exactly, ma'am," Gail said, "it all came from his deep seated physical feelings. Matti simply couldn't actually see one of that species without getting the sensation of being attacked yet again. His chest would get pained. His face would get this twitching because it seemed like it got covered with blood and guts one more time. It... yeah, it was awful. In conclusion, he became a half-recluse. He only stopped being a full one because of my grandmother."

That appeared as good a point to truly finish as any. Gail slipped off of the table, carefully collecting his notebook and sliding it into a pocket, and went for the meeting's table of refreshments. A bunch of murmurs thanking Gail for sharing his genealogy story sounded off. The gopher couldn't make any of them out properly, but he still nodded as he sipped some more lemon-lime soda.

"So, what you're saying is," an oddly short and extremely fat antelope started to say. All across the room, a few groans began. The antelope apparently had some kind of a reputation that neither Gail nor his friend knew anything about.

"Yes, sir?" Gail asked, finishing with his can of soda.

"You're saying that your great-grandfather couldn't _bear_ to see one of them?"

The fox and gopher both threw their soda cans at him.

**A few minutes later in an adjacent parking lot,**

"You want to stop by BugBurga, I'm sure," the gopher said, tossing the small sedan's keys to his fox companion.

The predator duly shot up a paw and caught it. Yet the reflective look upon his face made things absolutely clear— his mind remained elsewhere. Gail, for his part, felt like taking a quasi-nap, sitting back at his apartment with a cool drink and a fan blowing right on his face. He didn't mind the notion of taking a long break from all of the genealogy research.

The sun dipped below in the horizon past the library's surprisingly big parking lot. The fox slipped into the driver's seat. Though he started the car, the radio playing a soothing piece of classical music, he leaned back and left it in park. The fox brushed a paw upon his plain t-shirt and looked right at his gopher companion.

"Gail?"

"Yeah?" the gopher answered. He slipped on his seat belt.

"You ever think that you'd actually be able to do it? What your great-grandfather did?"

The question seemed to strike Gail physically, the gopher shifting about awkwardly in his seat. The 'it' didn't need describing. They both knew what exactly 'it' meant. For all his work with his friendly roommate during the past several evenings, Gail had spent quite a lot of time right before sleeping just lying on the bedsheets and thinking. Some issues truly didn't have an answer.

"What I want to say is 'I don't know'," Gail remarked, letting the car's fan blow on him.

"What you 'want to say'..."

"Michel," Gail said. He leaned himself out and pressed a paw against the glove compartment. 

The fox knew that dispensing with the nicknames meant that the gopher had something dead serious to say— something well-thought out and deeply important. He cleared his throat. "Yeah?"

"The truth is, after a lot of reflection," Gail began, "the fair answer is a straight-up 'no'. Come on, I mean, could I've joined up with some militant group? Fought off huge predators? Defended my country without any reasonable hope that we could actually pull it off? Of course, I'd run away in total fear."

"Gail..."

"It'll never leave my mind," the gopher went on, getting himself agitated yet again, "all of the parallels of how I act and sound like one 'Matti'. But I'm talking about the other 'Matti' that popped into existence after the war— when it made some Goddamn sense! Spending every other second afraid of his own shadow? Getting panic attacks from being in public places? Losing it because the wrong mammal could pop out of nothing other than the wrong bathroom stall?"

"Hold on, please."

"He carried this mental prison around with him. Making him an eternal POW wherever he walked, yeah, but it made sense! At least," Gail declared, "he had his own earlier life. He meant something grand. He did something incredible. Me?"

The gopher slapped his shoulders with both paws. He sucked down a deep breath. The fox merely watched.

"I get short of breath whenever I step into a subway station, just the flashing lights being enough to set me off!" The gopher let out a low moan. "And I've gone through nothing! Oh, sure, got bullied when I was little— picking up a lot of crap from friends, neighbors, teachers, and whatever for being too short, too skinny, too stupid, and whatever the hell else they through at me... that's nothing at all special! That's regular life for regular folks, and they manage to work nine-to-five jobs paying for their own healthcare... no problem!"

"Gail, enough of the ranting, seriously," the fox remarked. He put an understanding arm around the gopher's back. "Listen to me."

"Okay." The gopher looked ready to cry.

"We know on my side, well," the predator began, "my branch of the McGuinness family left for nothing more complicated than simple famine. They considered things 'an act of God'. They got whacked around like pinballs in a huge machine, feeling totally helpless. They promised themselves that they'd settle in a place that hadn't had a famine in its entire history— the vowed their descendants would never know the horror of it all. And they succeeded. The other side? The Swedish side? Nearly exactly the same."

"Yeah..."

"Everybody, even up to my own parents, had this lingering shadow," the fox went on, "making sure that they saved everything. They reused everything. They never wasted a single speck of anything remotely edible. 'Phobia' isn't the right word for that, but whatever the right word is... it's sure to be pretty damn close."

"It's that I keep looking at Matti, and..."

The predator suddenly shoved himself forward. He locked the gopher's body into a close hold. Their eyes locked upon each other's emotional faces.

"Matti Holkeri spent his entire youth preparing for the moment when he'd have to live through raw, blood-soaked war," the fox declared, "and whatever fears and phobias came about from the actual fighting doesn't change one fundamental truth. His biggest worry of all— the thing that motivated every single mammal in the conflict— was that all of that would continue. That more guns, more planes, more trucks, and all the hell else would blast across the borders over and over again. That was the biggest, most primal fear of all."

"And he won."

"They won." The fox leaned back a bit, and he began to chuckle. "And even though Sweden kept weirdly neutral through all of that crap, hell, if we assume their heart being in the right place... that means 'we won'. We seriously did."

"It sort of is true, Michel," Gail said. He scratched his chin as he tried to force the new batch of thoughts deep into the bubbling pit of self-hatred that was his subconscious. "I mean... the worst worry for any dad or mom will always be something bad happening to their kids, and getting mixed up in yet another war has to become like the most nightmarish thing imaginable. Compared to that, some panic attacks from certain predators seems like a walk in the park."

"Speaking of which," the fox chimed in, shifting the car's gears, "we're going to go eat over in Oak Park."

Gail simply nodded. They remained silent for a bit as the car shuffled through a bunch of intersections. The little sedan often poised precariously beside gigantic RVs and even bigger semis, but the fox always got them into the correct lane in time. Finally, they pulled into the last spot of the BugBurga drive through. The grizzly bear at the outer register stuck out a big container of sweet potato fries, which the group of raccoons in the SUV seized in a split-second.

"Got to say it," Gail began, taking a big whiff of the fries that smelled as wonderful as they looked, "I thank God that I don't have Matti's specific fear of the big, claw-covered guys."

A few seconds of mere waiting passed. The two friends got a chance to pull up. Something catching the corner of the gopher's eye caused him to bend over and scout the floor of the car.

"Good evening! I'd like two of the 'number elevens', please," the fox called out.

"Hey, brah," the drive through's bear said, his huge face lighting up, "it's been too damn long! Haven't seen you since Calc 101! How've you been?"

"Honestly? It's been pretty awesome,' the fox replied, grinning.

"You finally able to ditch that douche-bag of a roommate? I knew it! I totally knew it!" The bear did an impromptu little happy dance. "Now, you can actually go out again and have some fun, like tonight? Not having some tiny piece of—"

"Well," Gail moaned, sticking his head out a bit and waving, "I think I _spoke too soon_."

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much for reading!
> 
> This is a part of the recurring 'Thematic Thursday' event, with the writing being a part of multiple stories focusing on fears and phobias. I'm fascinated by genealogical research, and I decided to throw in a bunch of semi-autobiographical references into this work. I've rarely written things about battles and warfare, so this is somewhat of an experiment in that front. Thanks again for looking at this.
> 
> (I just want to make a little note here that I've revised the piece a tad since I first uploaded it.)


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